Backing up veracrypt encrypted drives

beefncheese · 30 Sep 2021

I am currently trying to backup a drive that has been encrypted with veracrypt. The main "system" drive acronis has no problem doing a full backup, it appears to detect the unencrypted C drive properly and everything is fine. I also have two other encrypted drives (encrypted with the same password) that it is unable to detect. It can detect the physical drive and read the encrypted volume but completely ignores the mounted, unencrypted volume. I can backup by flat files but I don't want to do that.

Just to be clear, I am a Linux dev and not really a windows user. I don't know the tricks (if any) to fool windows into treating the mounted volumes as hardware (or whatever it's doing). Did a bunch of reading and only found people in the same situation.

The only horrifically hacky solution I could think of would be to throw another layer of abstraction in there and use vmware/qemu with the unencrypted drives and that might let me read them. Surely there is something better.

ps. also tested with macrium for good measure, same results.

dalchina · 02 Oct 2021

Hi, I'll assume you are using disk imaging rather than backing up data.

Disk imaging addresses drive content and creates a compressed copy of the used parts of the selected drives/partititions, as I expect you know.

However you then refer to

completely ignores the mounted, unencrypted volume

I would never expect that to be handled by a disk imaging program.

Note that VeraCrypt never saves any decrypted data to a disk–it only stores them temporarily in RAM (memory). Even when the volume is mounted, data stored in the volume is still encrypted.

https://www.veracrypt.fr/code/VeraCr...82f573e66cd208

I also have two other encrypted drives (encrypted with the same password) that it is unable to detect.

On that, sorry, I've no idea, as I've never attempted this.

For interest, and note the sector by sector (forensic image) comment:
Image of Veracrypt encrypted system drive

Consider posting screenshots of what Macrium sees, together with those from a 3rd party partition manager such as Minitool Partition Wizard.

Bear in mind that here you are addressing the interaction of two 3rd party programs. You may be better using a Veracrypt support forum, for example. Macrium's forum is readable, but only paid users can post there. There are very few threads here referring to Veracrypt.

dictum · 20 Mar 2024

I know this is an old thread but still relevant.

I had a similar situation. I had a win10 PC with multiple HDDs. I encrypted one with Veracrypt and then cloned it with Macrium Reflect. It has worked very well in the past. But I found out it doesn't work with VeraCrypt the hard way. The primary HDD crashed. I thought no problem, I have a complete image of the operating system. I booted into the clone HDD, or tried to and realized that I could not decrypt it. Somehow the disk encryption in VeraCrypt uses the disk info as part of its security. Maybe disk serial number or something unique to the disk. Meaning a perfect clone will not decrypt. As the software realizes it has become a clone and refuses to boot. Even with the right password.
I think you have to decrypt your source disk, clone it, or back it up, then encrypt it again, then encrypt your clone or backup.
It's not a bug, it is a feature.